Now that I'm in my 40s, my clothes are getting tight around the middle, even though my eating and exercise habits haven't changed. What's going on?
If the results of a study that followed nearly 7,000 men into middle age hold true for women, too, no one is likely to escape middle-age spread. Researchers at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in Berkeley, CA, surveyed male runners and found that those who continued to run the same distance between the ages of 20 and 50 still gained an average of 3.3 pounds and three quarters of an inch at the waist every decade, regardless of the number of miles they ran each week. But despite the gain, the runners were still leaner than their sedentary counterparts. The lesson: Exercising more as you get older will help offset the near-inevitable expanding waistline that aging brings.
--Delia Hammock, M.S., R.D., and Samantha Buckanoff, M.S., R.D.